Modelling Context Effects in Exit Choice for Building Evacuations

Understanding exit choice behaviour is essential for optimising safety management strategies in building evacuations. Previous research focused on contextual attributes, such as spatial information, influencing exit choice, often using utility models based on monotonic functions of attributes. Howev...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Fire (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2024-05, Vol.7 (5), p.169
Main Authors: Gao, Dongli, Liang, Xuanwen, Chen, Qian, Qiu, Hongpeng, Lee, Eric Wai Ming
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
building evacuations
Computer aided decision processes
Context
context effects
Crowds
Decision making
Efficiency
Evacuation
Evacuation of civilians
Evacuations & rescues
exit choice behaviour
Fire prevention
Performance evaluation
Preferences
Probability
Safety management
Safety measures
social force model
Spatial data
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Summary:Understanding exit choice behaviour is essential for optimising safety management strategies in building evacuations. Previous research focused on contextual attributes, such as spatial information, influencing exit choice, often using utility models based on monotonic functions of attributes. However, during emergencies, evacuees typically make rapid, less calculated decisions. The choice of context can significantly impact the evaluation of attributes, leading to preference reversals within the same choice set but under varying context conditions. This cognitive psychological phenomenon, known as context effects, encompasses the compromise effect, the similarity effect, and the attraction effect. While researchers have long recognised the pivotal role of context effects in human decision making, their incorporation into computer-aided evacuation management remains limited. To address this gap, we introduce context effects (CE) in a social force (SF) model, CE-SF. Evaluating CE-SF’s performance against the UF-SF model, which considers only the utility function (UF), we find that CE-SF better replicates exit choice behaviour across urgency levels, highlighting its potential to enhance evacuation strategies. Notably, our study identifies three distinct context effects during evacuations, emphasising their importance in advancing safety measures.
ISSN:2571-6255
2571-6255
DOI:10.3390/fire7050169